Coordinated by Greg Downey, a former computer programmer turned arts and sciences professor at a big midwestern university, comes a tentative, fragementary, and probably sometimes contradictory ongoing exploration of the relations between information / communication technology, knowledge production and consumption, global political-economy, and the lived world of human labor. We only blog part-time, so don't expect new posts more often than once a week.

Sunday, July 03, 2005

Appalling information labor factoid of the day

From a NYT book review of Clyde Prestowitz's Three billion new capitalists, reviewer Henry Blodget offered up this sad example of the future of the US information-labor workforce (and our society's committment to that future):

Globally, our 12th-graders rank only in the 10th percentile in math (that's 10th percentile, not 10th). Our students also rank first in their assessment of their own performance: we're not only poorly prepared, we have delusions of grandeur.

Something to think about the next time your local government cuts funding to public education (Madison, I'm talking to you), or your state government cuts funding to university education (Wisconsin, I'm talking to you).